最新消息

We hope you can join this talk by our special guest speaker, James Henri. Our last speaker, Deborah Stipek was featured in today’s SCMP.  Similarly, Mr. Henri will give some wonderful examples of how to create the right environment at home and at school to encourage your child’s love of learning.   http://lovetolearnws13-eorg.eventbrite.hk/  

When my daughter is eager to relate news back to her teachers, she has a habit of interrupting them at inconvenient times. Once, after she told me the street that her teacher Miss K lived on, I mentioned that I used to live on the same street before getting married. My daughter exuberantly told poor Miss K about it as she was trying to corral a dozen five-year-olds for morning exercises. One Monday morning as my daughter was getting ready for school, I recount with her all the fun things we did at the weekend. I tell her gently that if she wants to regale Miss K with these tales, she can do so after morning exercises – or better yet, when she is asked about it. Much to my surprise, my daughter’s eyes cloud over and she looks terribly offended. She crawls under our coffee table, declaring that she will never go to school again. I lovingly explain that she shouldn’t react this way. When she refuses to budge, I give up on cajoling and turn to reverse psychology, shrugging my shoulders and telling her it’s perfectly fine with me if she never sees her teachers or plays with her friends at school

  Please forward to friends so they can join a fun night out for a great cause! Any interested sponsors or parties who would like to donate raffle prizes or silent auction items, please contact Bring Me a Book at info@www.bringmeabook.org.hk

Soups are an important part of any Chinese meal. Being Shanghainese, I grew up with two-ingredient soups that were ready to be served after one hour of boiling: chicken and shiitake mushroom; pork and carrot; tomato and egg. But it is the Cantonese who have elevated soup-making to an art form, with exotic ingredients double-boiled for several hours. In fact, soup serves as comfort food in many cultures: American chicken noodle soup, Mexican tortilla soup, Irish potato soup, Italian minestrone, and Vietnamese pho. I pulled off my bookshelf a handful of picture books that use the process of making soup to share a moral lesson. A book toddlers will enjoy is Melissa Iwai’s Soup Day, in which a mother and daughter buy vegetables, wash and chop them, then play together while the soup is being cooked. At the end, the father comes home and they share the soup. My children love Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Soup With Rice: A Book of Months. This poem about a little boy who loves chicken soup with rice throughout the year is often requested during reading in our home. The making of the soup supersedes the eating in Be

    Our Australian friends and children’s book author Arthur Charles and illustrator Kate Anderson visited Hong Kong recently to share “The Adventures of Poucher and Big Guy”, travel stories of an Australian boy and his animal friends. On a sunny Monday morning of May 13, 130 Year One students of Yew Chung International School, aged 5 to 7, had a great fun listening  to Arthur (known as the Big Guy) and Kate read and talk about their work.  The children were intrigued right away by the Australian animals depicted in the books, and it was just irresistible for them to follow Arthur to mimic the Kookaburra’s laughing sounds!  They listened with amazement when Kate explained how she put Poucher and Big Guy’s adventures on paper with waterpaint. Their hearts went with Poucher and Big Guy when Arthur read selected chapters from the books. The children held their breath when Poucher and Big Guy were in trouble, laughed when Larry the Bully learnt his lesson, and clapped and cheered when Big Guy won his horse race!  It was just wonderful to see the kids leaving the Book Talk session smiling with grea

With volunteer activities on three consecutive weekends, March turned into volunteering month in our family. The first activity was Flag Day. We stood outside a shopping centre in Causeway Bay and solicited donations for the Hong Kong Society for Rehabilitation. The correct order of events should be: volunteer asks “please buy a flag sticker”, donor drops spare change in donation bag and volunteer puts sticker on donor’s lapel. In our case, our children simultaneously solicited and stuck stickers on passersby, in effect guilting these sticker-laden strangers into emptying their wallets. Flag Day was the prelude to selling raffle tickets at the Dutch Chamber of Commerce annual ball. Our group of young volunteers enthusiastically accepted the challenge by accosting ballgoers with gap-toothed grins and a ready shpiel. They felt so proud of their accomplishment: raising tens of thousands of dollars in a mere 60 minutes. It was also a good opportunity to practise math in everyday life. Question: At $100 per ticket or 6 tickets for $500, if a man gives you $1000 and asks for 6 tickets, how much change do you give back? A

  Pay it forward: Raising children who are ‘bucket fillers’   相關專欄 Annie Ho’s Weekly Column

我們怎樣才能提供一個可讓孩子積極參與、且富有成效的學習環境？ 歡迎參加書伴我行（香港）基金會的「愛閱讀‧愛學習」講座系列，是次講座會由Deborah Stipek教授（前斯坦福大學教育學院院長）主講，設有問答環節，讓大家了解更多。講座將以英語及廣東話進行，如有興趣知悉更多「愛閱讀．愛學習」的活動詳情，請瀏覽www.lovetolearn.asia 或 http://www.eventbrite.hk/org/3620381505  

  15,000 youngsters in HK created their own reading record and celebrated Shakespeare’s birthday (and World Book Day) on 23 April. It was a unique of event, held at the HK Stadium, with the “Most People Reading Aloud Together”. We thank SCOLAR for their efforts to promote English language learning through stories but please do invite Bring Me a Book Hong Kong next time to make it even more fun for those involved, to really ignite a lifetime love of reading.

Illustrated books open children’s minds to a world full of wonders The fact that life extends far beyond Hong Kong pervades our home. We have a toy globe, a desk mat printed with a map of the world and framed photos from my children’s visits abroad. This global awareness hasn’t stopped my elder daughter from telling her friends while I was away in the United States that her mummy had gone to Germany, or that her very British teacher is from America. Much like many cities in China end with zhou (Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Wenzhou), the Chinese names of major countries end with guo, hence my daughter’s erroneous proclamations. Surprisingly, she remembers the country wrongly but is able to translate it into its correct English name. A map of the world is a handy tool at home. I used it to show my daughter the proximity of Madagascar to the African continent, to help her understand that the animals from the animated movie with that name are much like the African safari animals she studied in school. I also pointed to the Caribbean when she asked why Raffi was singing Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) in